Third Pentagon
The Third Pentagon is a location in Stanislaw Lem's Novel Memoirs Found in a Bathtub. It is also referred to as the Last Pentagon. It is usually referred to by its inhabitants as The Building. "Certain passages from the chronicles pointed to the existence of yet another, a Third Pentagon. This was to have been a closed, completely independent unit, a state within a state, by virtue of sophisticated camouflaging and enormous reserves of food, water and compressed air." "Wid-Wiss ... published a treatise in which he maintained that, as the power of the Prez-tendz began to wane and their dominions diminish, they resolved to build a new seat of government, one far from all populated areas, somewhere in the mountainous regions of Ammer-Ka and hidden deep beneath the rocks, that this last refuge of Kap-Eh-Taahl might be inaccessible to the uninitiated. Wid-Wiss held that the postulated Pentagon of the Last Dynasty was a kind of collective military brain whose task was twofold: first, to watch over and preserve the purity of the faith, and secondly to convert those peoples of the world who had abandoned the true path." According to a Thesis published by Wid-Wiss, the Third Pentagon was built in the Rocky Mountains as the United States were losing control over territory and the influence of capitalism was waning, by Presidential order. The Third Pentagon was to house the Defense Ministry, Command Centers of the different branches of the Army, and all intelligence services and was to serve as a centralized command and intelligence gathering structure. The chronology of the treatise was rejected by other scholars like Yoo Na Vaak, Quirlso and Pisuovo (Supergnostors from the Martian School of Comparative Paleography). They claimed that since the Third Pentagon had been only recently constructed and completed before the Papyralysis and that the United States would have used the event for trying to gain control of Planet Earth in the ensuing confusion. Even if that had been defeated by the Federation, the attempt should have been noted in Folklore, which is not the case. Wid-Wiss claimed that the Third Pentagon had been isolated from the outside world as the population of America joined the Federation and abandoned the United States, together with the ideology of capitalism that was so vigourosly defended by it. Wid-Wiss defended his hypothesis, claiming that when the populace of Ammer-Ka went over to the side of the "heretics" and joined the Federation, the priests of the Last Pentagon ordered it to be completely sealed off from the outside world. So the underground Moloch isolated itself from the rest of humanity and endured to the Chaotic without the least knowledge of what was taking place on the surface of the earth. This absolute, hermetic isolation of a community of priests and warriors of Kap-Eh-Taahl did seem, Wid-Wiss admitted, a bit unlikely. So he went on to speculate that the Last Pentagon may have possessed scanning devices on the outside. He did not think, however, that the collective military brain of the Last Dynasty was capable of any offensive or even diversive action. It certainly could not have attacked or engineered a coup against the Federation, for once the colossus had buried itself in rock and severed all ties with the future course of history, it was imprisoned not only by impenetrable walls but by the very nature of its internal organization. From that time on it thrived exclusively on the myth, the legend of the glory that was Kap-Eh-Taahl, and investigated, rooted out and waged bitter war against heresy -- the heresy within. Our Histognostors answered these arguments with a stony silence. But Wid-Wiss did not give in. For twenty-seven years, with only a handful of loyal colleagues to help him, he combed the Rocket Mountains from end to end. Just when almost everyone had forgotten him, his stubbornness was dramatically vindicated. On 28 Mey 3146, the head archeological team, having cleared away several hundred tons of rubble at the foot of Haar-Vurd Peak, stood before a convex shield, cleverly camouflaged, excellently preserved: this was the entrance to the Last Pentagon. Exploration of the underground building, however, proved extremely difficult and demanded extraordinary methods. In the seventy-second year of its retreat from the world, the Pentagon of the Last Dynasty succumbed to a natural disaster. A slight shift in the mountain's granite core produced a fissure that traveled down through several strata until it came into contact with magma. The building's concrete protective shell could not withstand the volcanic pressure; molten lava entered and filled the interior from top to bottom. And so that strange anthill of the last of the Prez-tendz became a giant fossil and, as such, waited one thousand six hundred and eighty years to be discovered." "The "Notes" were discovered in the third year of excavation, on the fourth level, within an intricate corridor system where there were several sanitation facilities. In one of these facilities, filled as the rest with igneous rock, were two human skeletons and, beneath them, a scroll of papyr -- the "Notes." "The reader will see for himself that the daring suppositions of Histognostor Wid-Wiss were for the most part quite accurate. The "Notes" portray the fate of a community locked beneath the earth, a community that refused to allow the infiltration of any news of real events, pretending it constituted the Brain, the Headquarters of an empire that extended even to the most remote galaxies. In time the pretense became belief, the belief a certainty. The reader will witness how the fanatical servants of Kap-Eh-Taahl created the myth of the Antibuilding, how they spent their lives in mutual surveillance, in tests of loyalty and devotion to the Mission, even when the last figment of that Mission's reality had become an impossibility and nothing remained but to sink ever deeper into the pit of collective madness." Category:Memoirs Found in a Bathtub Category:Location Category:The Building Category:Building